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Sunday, January 01, 2017

How I Spent My Feast Of The Holy Innocents Day

Some people recovered from Christmas.
We got back home from our trip to Bountiful ( i.e., anywhere my granddaughter is ) a little past midnight, arriving early on Childermas - the feast of the children that the gospels say Herod put to the sword as he sought to slay new-born Jesus.

Some people acted out the rituals of the sacred dogma of weapons, however. Some of us did not dodge their duties on a generally recognized gun day celebration - יוםהאקדח - jour de l'arme - whatever. Some of us went out and slaughtered innocents.

An 8-year-old boy was shot and killed as he walked home from a cousin’s birthday party, authorities said.
Rasheed Cunningham Jr. had left the gathering just a few doors down from his Dania Beach, Florida, home and was walking with several other family members when shots rang out Wednesday evening, according to the Broward County Sheriff’s office.

His grandmother collapsed in grief outside the home she shared with Rasheed, when she learned he was dead, CBS Miami reported. Rasheed's birthday is Jan. 9.

A neighbor told the station that a black car pulled up and someone jumped out wearing a ski mask and fired round after round into the group.
“You can hear ‘pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow,’ then they jump back in the car, slam the door and went back in reverse,” said Veronica Larkens...

I used to just skip by this mortality stuff. If we wanted weapons so badly then we must accept a few sacrifices, a few "statistics", just as we do for automobiles and roads. Here in Michigan we have so benighted a government that it saves money by inadequately funding roads and the legislature accepts the inevitable highway fatalities with a macabre glee!
It goes with the territory.
So also with weapons and guns. If we wish to have a political religion of Weapons, a dogma Second Amendment, then we must accept the correlated increase in deaths here and there. It is just like fireworks: once we made all fireworks legal, people began blowing their body parts off - just like in the old days when such maiming led to the outlawing of those fireworks. I think there were a couple of sports figures who seriously maimed themselves in the past 3 trips around the old Sun.

These things are acceptable statistics that go with our better way of life

A big thumbs up for the collateral damage of deaths of innocents that goes with unrestrained Saturnalia of arms and weapons.

The important part of all this is the mere fact that we argue about it.
When we speak of young Rasheed being killed, some may say it was due to social factors, such as his neighborhood, and say the fatalities are caused by poverty or urban decay or something else.

I say, however, that it is all one. The culture is an emergent phenomenon that is greater and different from the sum of its parts. Therefore, we cannot understand the culture by merely going back and looking at its parts.

Having spent time with my granddaughter, when I read now about children being killed everywhere in the world, it breaks my heart.
We are playing Herod.